


The Ghost of a Flea

by mitspeiler



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ghosts, Horror, Multi, Occult, Regency, Spiritualism, William Blake - Freeform, history au, they are humping everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 20:39:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2123910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitspeiler/pseuds/mitspeiler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since she was a child, Jade could see spirits.  She awakens from a laudanum induced stupor (prescribed to cure her "hysteria") just in time to catch her brother Jake very hypocritically holding a seance in their house.  The medium promised that nothing bad would happen, even as the souls of the dead wail in her ear.  There is a strange man in the pantry and who knows how he got there.  The restless dead are everywhere, and they are trying to <em>have sex with everything</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost of a Flea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rezi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rezi/gifts).



["[William] Blake, for the only time in his life, saw a ghost... Standing one evening at his garden-door in Lambeth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim figure, 'scaly, speckled, very awful,' stalking downstairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or after, he took to his heels, and ran out of the house."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bkek4vqE-A)

—Alexander Gilchrist, concerning an event in 1790

The ancestral home of the English clan was a castle in the North Country that had been destroyed by a meteor impact in 1652.  The family had been broken and scattered to the four winds, losing most of their fortunes in the process.  The old castle had been a dark place, a den of murder and incest that would have made Caligula vomit in terror.  It’s said that the last ruler of that unhappy house had chewed off his own leg, like an animal in a trap.  

Jake English, esq., last scion of the unfortunate family, looked in the mirror, quick green eyes taking in his entire form, and straightened his cravat.  His coat, smoky green and suitably dashing, was in perfect order.  He had jet black hair which was in a stunningly unfashionable cowlick, the beginnings of a fantastic moustache, and a variety of titles both hereditary and earned in service to the crown (aspects that could be detected just as easily as hair and eye color by some members of the elite).  Satisfied, he turned on his heel and looked out the window, a goofy grin on his face.  Outside, the sun had set on London, and a few wisps of firecloud lingered above the chimneytops.  Say what you want about excessive pollution, but it can produce some _stunning_ sunsets.

He was expecting guests.  Every Friday he had a game night for his various friends, family members, and their respective love interests.  Tonight they were in for a special treat.  He was going to throw them a seance.

Dirk Strider had blown into London on some trade wind or other.  For the past several years, the adventurer had been exploring India and become very enamoured with it, and carried a tulwar of true Damascus steel with him at all times.  On any lesser man it would have been a tasteless affectation, but Dirk exuded power with his every movement, the tassles on his hessian boots swinging rhythmically with his tiger-like walk.  His clothing was, in one word, _loud_.  He wore an Indian shirt, brilliant orange and embroidered with odd shapes, with no waistcoat and no cravat.  His deep pink and purple greatcoat was worn not only open but merely hanging off his shoulders like a cape, secured by a thin gold chain.  On his head he wore a sober hat, a slightly conical hat that was the ancestor of the top hat, decorated with a competely unnecessary buckle.  It would not have been entirely out of place if not for its bright orange hue.  On his face he wore spectacles shaped like scalene triangles that did nothing for his vision and what’s more had been darkened somehow.  People stared as he walked by, partly from the ridiculousness of his outfit, and partly from the aura he exuded.  It was a certain degree of superiority, but not average everyday _bourgeois_ superiority; Dirk Strider was simply a superior being, a prince among men.

He found the neat black and white house, built in a more subdued version of what had been in style three monarchs ago, wedged in between two slightly larger brick homes.  The lamplighter, a round little man with a jolly face came around the corner and scampered up the nearest pole.  In moments, the corner was lit with the creamy golden glow of burning gas.  Dirk ascended the stairs and knocked.

Jake answered his own door, being an uncouth moron.  He looked at Dirk dully, a smile slowly cracking his face in two.  He slapped Strider across the face, and while the man was reeling, dragged him inside to ravish him.

Vriska Serket was a disinherited Irishwoman who’d come to England looking for a way to get rich.  John Egbert was a comedic actor in a threadbare blue frockcoat that had been beautiful three owners ago.  They had just finished having sex in Jake English’s pantry.

“John stop it, no,” Vriska hissed, slapping his hand away.  “I need to get the useless English her opiates.”  She leapt to her feet, straightened her skirt, and began mixing chemicals right there in the cupboard.  The smell made John gag.

“Stop being a racist,” he said, voice nasally from holding his nose.

Vriska coughed, partly from the fumes and partly from the statement.  “I’m sorry, but _what?_ ”

John chuckled, an action that quickly also turned into a cough.  “The useless _English?_  I thought you loved me!”

Vriska snorted.  “You’re an idiot, and I do, love you,” she turned, the decanter of amber fluid resting on a tray, and kissed his forehead.  “Now shut up before the stupid English hears you, I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

John chuckled as she opened the door and sat down on a sack of potatoes.

As Vriska walked up the stairs, she remembered the brilliant blue and white columbine stuck in her wild scarlet hair.  She plucked it out, gave it a hearty sniff, feeling a tingle all through her body as she did so, before shoving the flower into her apron pocket.  Vriska pretended not to care about John’s ridiculous blue flowers, but in all honesty she loved them.  It brought her back to the first time they met.  “A blue flower represents beauty, and otherwordliness, and striving for the unattainable,” he’d said, a huge smile on his face, as he handed her a globe thistle.  “Also, you’re Scottish, so I thought a thistle was—”  She punched him in the mouth and warned him never to darken the English house’s door again.  It didn’t stop him from leaving notes for her all along the route she took for her daily routine, just pleasant things, asking about her day and all, until she finally warmed up to him.

She was so filled with warm feelings that she opened the wrong door and walked in on Jake English having sex with Dirk.

Jade, the useless English, lay in a laudanum induced haze halfway between waking and dreaming.  As a child, she’d been kissed by an angel; she’d been very young and could hardly remember it.  Ever since, however, she could see spirits.  The world was infested with spirits.  They came in every shape and size, with strange geometries and features she could not even begin to describe.  In the day, it was not so bad.  Just a few forlorn human spirits barely aware that they were dead, and hosts of sparkling angels, each larger than life, yet small enough to sit comfortably in the boughs of a tree, one to a branch, wings bespangling it like a Christmas tree.  At night, however, came the others.  In those days, a dog with no eyes would lay across her bed, white as silver.  He growled at the damned of purgatory as they circled and whispered, gnarled claws hungry for her touch.  He told her things, in her heart, for he could not speak.  Secrets about the nature of the world.  He was long gone.

Jade didn’t know how people could stand it.  As she wandered through the halls, eyes dark and empty with the opiate, she bumped into the maid.  God, but she hated her.  Jade tried her best to scowl at the ginger girl, but she probably only managed to look sick.  The night-spirits clawed at her face and neck, swarming him like ants at a picnic table.  They wanted to touch the living, to paw at them and manhandle them, just for the hint of a memory of being alive, and not being a wretched _thing_.  

Q: _How comes it that thou art out of Hell?_

Purgatory seared off their living sins, but the burning warped them into horrible, terrible creatures.  And purgatory was right here, and there, and everywhere.  One of them was in the maid's pocket, wriggling about, groping and sniffing...something.  Vriska paid them no mind.  The spirits did this to everyone.  No one noticed.

A: _Why this_ is _Hell, nor am I out of it._

Vriska was arguing about something with someone, of that Jade was sure.  There was that bitter medicine smell that had come to fill everything; her room, her hair, her dreams as she slept and the damned suckled warmth from her skin, all smelling of laudanum.  The maid had dropped Jade’s medicine, and now the wretched amber stink was going to stain the hall and make it smell forever.

Jake was standing in the doorway to his bedroom, wearing nothing but his housecoat and a _poetic_ blush.  Someone was in there with him, wearing even less.  No one noticed Jade, she she snuck a look.  The other man was handsome, and wearing even less.  He had only a single spirit on him, a horrible little man with a face halfway between a clown’s and a painted whore’s, who laughed to himself.  Jade couldn’t hear spirits, but imagined it went something like _haa haa hee hee hoo hoo,_ just like the loathsome pale doctor that had gotten her brother to put her on laudanum in the first place.  “Jake,” she mumbled, and then everyone stopped.  Even the spirits stopped their virile humping of the living.  Tongue thick and clumsy, she went on.  “I am feeling better.  I want to play tonight.”

Jake choked.  “Ah, well, that’s absolutely crackerjack, dear soeur!” he said with feigned enthusiasm.  “But, ah, this is a tad embarrassing, tonight’s game has the potential to be...let’s say...triggering for you?  Considering your condition and all.”

“What are we doing?” Jade asked, feeling the words come to her a little bit more with each sentence uttered.

Jake coughed and meandered until, finally, the naked man called, “Jake’s having a medium over for a seance.”

Jade raised her eyebrow.  “I guess I’ll try to have fun.”

“You don’t,” Jake mumbled,  “I’m really sorry, I’ll make it up to—”

“I want to see how I stack up next to her,” Jade said, smile going wry.

“Ah!” Jake said nervously, “jolly good what!”

“You’re really nervous,” Jade said, tilting her head.

“That’s a fucking lie,” he insisted.  “It’ll be great fun!”

It was, most unfortunately, _not_ a dark and stormy night.  In fact, it seemed as if God himself had stretched out his hand to wipe the usual wretched smears of polluted fog from the London cityscape to provide a night as had not been seen in a century.   _Stars_ were visible as the guests shuffled into a small sitting room after supper.  It was all green, from its carpet to its ceiling.  The wallpaper was green, thick with patterns of alternating emerald and lime.  The room’s fixtures and decorations were made of or decorated with jade.  The gaslamp that provided light was tinted green.  The guests looked at each other as they sat, each beholding a disgusting pall of green on everyone else’s face.

The Lord Equius was there.  He was a powerfully built man, and growing more powerful as his investments in the mechanization of the empire became more and more profitable.  He’d even invented a few of the devices that were even now being shipped overseas to new factories.  None of that, however, distracted from the pain in his left hand.  He never could get the hang of drinking from glasses and had cut himself quite badly at the most recent attempt.  The bandage glowed eerily.

The night’s guests also included the Lady Lalonde, a novelist and notable spiritualist who’d penned a dramatic tale of darkest majjyks and resurrected dead, only to be told that _Frankenstein_ had just come out and the world simply _could not handle_ two talented female horror writers existing and being competent all at once.  “It’s not her fault,” she would say.  “It’s the fault of the idiotic patriarchal establishment, feeling inadequate whenever more than one woman in a decade does something other than go mad in their attic.”  However, when very drunk, she would cry and curse the name of “that utter bitch Mary!”  She was very keen on matters of the occult, and somewhat like Jade, had come partly to test her knowledge on the subject against an alleged medium’s.

The other, Sir Karkat Vantas, had had to be dragged here, and he quietly seethed at the table, unnaturally sharp teeth clenched, red eyes bloodshot and wide.  If anyone had been unfamiliar with him, they would have thought the albino knight was a ghost himself.  “I’m not going to say that I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.   He’d fought in the war of 1812 and seen his fair share insanity.  “That would be asinine.  I read too many books with one asshole who doesn’t believe in whatever the hell until it’s eating his face already.”  He pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Seriously, just once I’d like to see some asshole dad say ‘shit let’s load up the carriage and get the fuck out of London’ when his dumbass kid tells him there’s a fucking grue in the closet or whatever the fuck.”  He was being uncharacteristically quiet, and the part leaned in to listen.

“BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL HIS ANGELS AND HIS MAJESTIC RAINBOW TROUSERS WHY WOULD WE WANT TO MESS WITH FUCKING GHOSTS, REAL OR NOT REAL, LET’S JUST LEAVE THE FUCKING DEAD WHERE THEY BELONG WHICH IS NOT WHERE THE FUCK I AM!”  All the other party guests nearly fell out of their chairs.

The medium reached across the table and placed her hand on his, a wide, friendly smile on her red, red lips.  Karkat felt a slight flush.  “There’s nothing dangerous about what we’re going to do,” said the medium, her voice calm and sweet.  Aradia Megido withdrew her hand and played with a chocolaty curl as if she were a schoolgirl.  “We won’t be summoning any dead relatives or anything completely horrible tonight,” she announced.  “We’ll be interviewing one of the most interesting and most _harmless_ entities in all of existence!”  A slight mania filled the medium’s eyes.  “Tonight we’ll be summoning the ghost of a...flea.”

Her stunning smile and confident assurance made the guests heave a sigh of relief, release a breath they hadn’t realized they were holding.  All except Jade, who was starting to feel incredibly itchy, and had no time to deal with this.

None of them would survive the night.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Victorian age is so fucking played out. I went Regency here bitches.  
> I think at some point I wanted to do a sincere horror story, but really, I am as incapable of that as I am incapable of flying, so let’s have horror-comedy. That painting has always creeped me out. William Blake has always creeped me out, let’s be honest here. And then, all of a sudden, I looked at the painting in an entirely new way thanks to Homestuck…  
> I open up this AU to all authors who may give a damn about creepy spiritualist practices in olden times when America was still becoming a “thing” and right before the one queen everyone knows the name of. Let’s call it Gaslightstuck or something.  
> And I gift this to [rezi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rezi), because I vaguely recall promising it to her after her publication of _[Farfelu House](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1216669/chapters/2489746), which is cool, you all should read it too (“you all” as if there’s more than like...five of you)._


End file.
